The Infant
by BoomChick
Summary: Sephiroth's mission is to wipe out everyone in a town, right down to the last child. Oneshot.


**A/N:** Major warnings for violence and child endangerment. A dark one-shot about Sephiroth's history as General. (Definitely canon non-compliant!)

**The Infant**

The great young General, lauded throughout Shinra as a warrior so vicious he was barely human, leaned against the side of a house and vomited. He retched, closing his eyes, trying not to inhale too deeply through his nose to pick up the smell of the bodies in the street-the blood on his hands-the gore on his jacket. He breathed shakily, fighting to control the reaction to the slaughter. His sword lay in the street behind him. It needed cleaning. It was coated in blood, and would rust without proper care. His stomach twisted at the very thought, and he clenched his teeth.

This town should not have resisted. They should have let Shinra have their land and stood down. A rebellion was not something the men he obeyed would put up with. Not from anyone. Especially not with tensions between them and Wutai growing. Sephiroth wished that at least they had rebelled before he had gained a reputation, back when Shinra would have chosen an army of men to massacre the resistance rather than sending him out alone as a 'test.'

Now there was no one to share the blame with him. No one for him to deflect any of the slaughter onto. No one to commiserate with. His only relief was that it was not a widely publicized mission. Shinra didn't want too many people to know that they were simply murdering anyone who wouldn't get out of their way. So they had sent him in alone, a fifteen year old General with more recorded kills than any of his older comrades.

Sephiroth pulled himself under control, inhaling deeply through his mouth and letting the breath back out. He walked over to his sword, picking it up slowly. There was nothing he could do to clean it yet. Not with blood covering his gloves and coat. He couldn't even wipe his face off yet. He kept his breathing even as he stepped out into the street, carefully stepping over the body of a young woman, still clinging to the club she had been using as a weapon against him when he slaughtered her.

He would need to report back to Shinra, but he would have to check every house first. They had a whole city's worth of actors lined up to take the places of these people he had killed. It made Sephiroth's stomach twist anew. By the time three days had passed, it would be as though nothing had happened. Anyone who stopped by the town would find it bustling as though there had never been a massacre. No one would ever know that the people who lived there were no more than actors, being paid to pretend that this had been their life all along.

He looked down at the corpse of an old man and the rifle next to him. He'd fought to the last breath. No actor could ever take the place of these people, he thought. They had not been warriors, but they were strong. Sephiroth regretted that killing them had become necessary. But it was their lives or his, and he was nothing if not selfish.

He walked through their houses. He checked under beds and in closets. He kept his breathing quiet to listen for the sounds of people hiding in the walls. The first seven homes were clear, and there were not many more in the town for him to check. He was beginning to hope that he had found all he was going to find. Then he heard the crying.

Sephiroth was not familiar with infants, but he knew the sounds they made. The first cries reached his ear like a sword-strike straight to his chest. He lost his breath, looking down at his hands. The blood staining them seemed to eat up his whole world as the baby's cries grew louder. No one was coming to tend to the child, Sephiroth thought. No one would be there to feed it. Even if he were to spare its life, it would die a much worse death than the one he could give it.

But his heart rebelled. His stupid, traitorous heart, that urged him towards kinship with his fellow Soldiers, who were so unlike him. The same heart that had drawn him close to Genesis and Angeal-so close that he had found that it actually affected him when Genesis snapped or Angeal lectured. He had had enough of listening to the stupid organ. And yet, the closer he walked to the crying, the more his hands shook, until the sunlight reflecting off his blade jittered as his sword shook in his grasp.

He stepped up to the house and stared down at the red headed woman collapsed in front of the doorway. The stab wound through her heart had barely bled at all before she died. The axe in her hands was rough with use, and he cast a glance to the stacks of chopped firewood in the side yard. He stepped over her and walked into her house.

It was not a big house-two rooms at most. The wailing infant was in the next room over. The child's screams seemed to pierce straight through Sephiroth. He winced at the volume, and for a moment he looked forward to slaughtering the baby just for the blessed silence it would bring. Then he had to stop, doubled over, fighting back sickness at the very thought. It wasn't enough that the child's mother lay outside, dead by his hand. It wasn't enough that no person this child had seen in its life was still alive. Now Sephiroth was going to have to murder it as well.

He took a shaking breath and walked into the room with the baby. Striking blue eyes, filled with glistening tears, stared up at him from the wailing infant, accusatory and innocent at once. Sephiroth looked down at the child in return, trying to tighten his grip on his sword and firm his resolve. He ran through the fastest, most painless ways to kill the child. He wanted this child's departure from the world to be swift.

"I'm sorry." He found himself whispering to the bawling infant.

The dusting of red hair on the child's head rose memories of killing the baby's mother. He'd hardly thought of her at the time. He was being shot at from across the road, and had slaughtered her without any trouble. She'd been screaming her rage, even until she fell, her axe raised to cleave his head open if he'd let her. He wondered if her last thoughts had been of this baby. He wondered if she'd been fighting for the child's sake.

"Your mother loved you, you know," he whispered to the infant. "That is more than some can say, no matter how long they live."

The infant screamed louder than ever, kicking in the crib where it lay, its little hands flailing ineffectively, as though trying to strike him. Sephiroth lifted his sword, his eyes never straying from the child.

He could not bring the sword down. He tried. He pleaded with himself mentally. He struggled with his foolish pity. To leave the child would be worse than a death by his sword. To attempt to save him would destroy not only the baby's life, but his own future at Shinra. But he could not bring his sword down. It would have been over for the baby in less than a breath-faster than it took to blink-but Sephiroth could not do it. He lowered his sword slowly to his side, staring at the screaming baby, then set the blade into its harness across his back and leaned down, lifting the baby carefully out of the crib.

The infant settled instantly at the touch, letting out a soft coo of delight and reaching up to grip Sephiroth's hair.

"You do not understand," Sephiroth whispered to the little thing. "I am not your friend, child. I have just destroyed your world."

The infant babbled happily up at him, yanking hard on his bangs. Sephiroth tried not to wince at the touch. He sat down on what must have been the mother's bed, holding the little creature against his chest. The infant was warm, and it hurt Sephiroth's heart to look at him. It hurt in the same place Angeal's disappointment did, or Genesis's jealousy. He bowed his head over the child and struggled to think.

"If I bring you back with me, they will not let you live or me escape punishment," he whispered. "I do not know what to do from here."

He heard the sound of a helicopter above him and lifted his head abruptly, jerking his hair out of the baby's hands. The child let out a wail of disappointment, struggling to catch hold of it again.

"The Turks," Sephiroth whispered. "I wonder."

He looked down to the child again, watching the adorable, ugly little thing wiggle and sniffle up at him. He pulled out his phone slowly, hesitating before calling the second in command of the Turks.

"Tseng," he said softly into the phone. "I've thought about your offer. I'm willing to lend my services if I can call in a favor right now. No questions asked."

There were no questions asked. Sephiroth left the wailing child in its crib and walked out of the house, only briefly making eye contact with the Turk as they passed in the doorway. He walked to the waiting helicopter and nodded to the pilot briefly.

He returned to Shinra to be lauded even more highly by those in charge. He found himself on the receiving end of much praise, and even more fear. There was a rumor throughout Shinra that General Sephiroth was a man so fearsome that he would murder even the smallest infant.

Angeal and Genesis were curious, but Sephiroth would not answer their questions. He gave his official report and went about his life, filling out paperwork and answering to summons from the labs. He did not speak of the infant. He and Tseng often passed in the course of their day to day routines, but they did not speak. And if now and then the General took a night out, and happened to be there to back up a Turk mission, it was certainly purely coincidence.

It was many years later when Sephiroth spied Tseng walking down the hallways with a young man he had not seen before wearing a wrinkled Turk uniform. The boy had brilliantly red hair, and eyes that shone, lively and blue. Sephiroth watched him pass with absolute attention, listening to the drawl of his complaints as he talked his superior's ears off. Tseng did not say anything or even look up, but Sephiroth knew. He knew what had become of the child he had spared all those years ago.

He turned and walked away, hurrying towards the transport he was supposed to be boarding. They were going to war with Wutai after all these years. He had no time to dwell on a mission that had taken half an hour twelve years ago. He tried not to think of it, but he could not get the image of the preteen trotting after Tseng down the hallway out of his head. Nor the image of the fierce red-headed woman who had died protecting her child.

The young Turk could never know that his mother had loved him. Sephiroth spent the long ride in the transport thinking of how very cruel the world was, to allow such things to happen. And about how much his selfishness had cost even that one small life.


End file.
